The Right of Way | Page 7

save that offered by the prosecution. He had undertaken the defence of
the prisoner because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law
justified itself; that it satisfied every demand of proof to the last atom
of certainty; that it met the final possibility of doubt with evidence
perfect and inviolate if circumstantial, and uncontradictory if
eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were to furnish basis of proof.
Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele. He had

now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took in the
judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and confidently,
to the people in the room. It was terribly hot, the air was sickeningly
close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady sitting not a
score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner stood. This lady's
face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged to a temperament
as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful. As Charley talked,
her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him. There was a
question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech was quite
absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was feeling for
him. Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in her direction
his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was sub- conscious, for
his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand, but it said to
her:
"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent. If a man
chose to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law
had no right to take advantage of it. He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada. He drew
an imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and
of the parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of
torture knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that
the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather
than have his family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before
him? Besides, though his past life might have been wholly blameless, it
would not be evidence in his favour. It might, indeed, if it had not been
blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion against him,
furnish some fancied motive. The prisoner had chosen his path, and
events had so far justified him. It must be clear to the minds of judge
and jury that there were fatally weak places in the circumstantial

evidence offered for the conviction of this man.
There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.
There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown. It
was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling.
Was there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
of the conversation had been brought into court? Men with quick
tempers might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not
always end in bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were
not so uncommon that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder.
The prisoner refused to say what that troubled conversation was about,
but who could question his right to take the risk of his silence being
misunderstood?
The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white
face and clinched hands listened moveless and staring. Charley Steele
was holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers. All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with distant dislike at
the prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain
only in his surly defiance.
But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in